Monday, March 12, 2012

If it possible to love a laundry room, I do love this one -- and boy howdy has it come a long way. Beginnings as a dingy, awkward workspace have turned into a structured mudroom/laundry room that gets a ton of use on a daily basis. Our former home had the mud-bench setup with storage and hooks aplenty and we piled so much stuff on it that I knew we needed a version of the same here. After taking my ideas/brainstorms to Kevin the Great, he came up with a design and proceeded to implement it exactly.

Cue the angels.

We used stained concrete for the floors because we knew durable and utilitarian was the way to go in here. Cabinets were painted out, a new mud bench took the place of the former counter-top and cabinet. We added a leather-finish granite that is way too nice to be in a laundry room. It was another remnant piece that at full price would have been something insane like $150 a square foot. We paid nothing close to that. The final piece of the laundry room puzzle? Why, a sparkly chandelier. I can't tell you what a big difference such a minor detail makes. It just makes the room much happier than a laundry room should be. I thought, hey, if you have to do gross things like laundry, it might as well be in a pretty room!

The details:

Walls: Sherwin Williams Mysterious Mauve

Cabinets, Mud Bench, and Trim: Sherwin Williams Dover White

Granite: Name escapes me, but someday I'll find out and add it here; Northwest Building Supply

Monday, March 5, 2012

Now, we come to the room where we spend 90% of our time in the house -- the family room. Attached the kitchen, it is the central hub of our house and the best place to cozy up as a family.

The existing built-ins in the room were custom-made for those big projection televisions of the 90s. (We still have one that we purchased in 2003, by the way that we have been meaning to haul to Colorado for about 3 or 4 years now). So, while I'm sure this was a very luxurious feature in 1994 when the home was built, now it didn't make sense for our much-loved flat screen. Kevin put on his thinking cap and instead of trashing the cabinets, we repurposed. Our resident contracting genius took the right side of the existing built-ins, lowered them, added some needed trim and presto-chango. A perfect, elevated spot for the TV of today.

My big project for this room was painting out the fireplace and the brass surround that again, I'm sure was fantastic when the home was new. It took many, many hours and gallons of paint to whip that fireplace into shape, but I love the way it turned out. I do have some future plans of redoing the entire thing in a cool stone, but those are distant future plans. I removed the brass surround, took it outside and used a heat-resistant black paint to paint out the brass (I sanded it down to rough it up a bit and it took the paint just fine without a primer). As far as painting the brick...I scrubbed it down to get it as clean as I could, then started painting (again, no primer).

We kept the carpet in here only for a comfort factor (I fought for all wood, Kevin demanded carpet. Kevin doesn't demand much, so he won.) We also have near future plans to install new French doors out to the patio. We actually ordered them, but when they came to install the custom-made doors, they were a huge, cheap-looking mess. We cancelled the install and the order and haven't revisited the whole issue since then. But, it is in the works and the original door is fine for now.

The bar area is a part of the family room and it's a fun space that we use way more than I thought we would. Every 80s/90s house has a wet bar, but this one is more full-on bar. Our plan was to make it a beverage station where the kids can grab drinks (and the adults), and we have one more landing space while entertaining (which we do a quite a bit, surprisingly).

Here, we painted out the wood in the same white as the trim and cabinets throughout, we added absolute black honed granite (my one oh-my-goodness-I-must-have for the kitchen and here), new sink, faucet, and tile backsplash to coordinate with the kitchen (see...sneak peeks!). There was an ice machine in this space, but we will be adding a beverage cooler and filling it to the brim with refreshing and tasty bevs.

I'm sure there's more to say about this space, but instead I'll get on with the pictures.